Chapter 7 Self and Identity

Autonoetic consciousness –

our ability to place ourselves in the past or future and other situations contrary to how the world is.

Ego Theory

argues that there is a single, unified self that observes and experiences the world. Self = Ego.

. Bundle Theory class –

our self is made of individual streams that bundle together to create the self. Those who struggle with themselves their strings are messy and tangled. We cannot explain the unity of consciousness or the whole life by referring to a single thing (concept, ego). The self is made up from a sequence of many different mental state’s events and thoughts each series of these experiences are like a bundle tied up with a string.

Bundle Theory argues that

we cannot explain the unity of consciousness or the unity of a whole life by referring to a single thing that has all the experiences. Instead of an ego, the self is made up from a sequence of many different mental states, event and thoughts. Each series of experiences is like “a bundle tied up with string: each series of mental events is unified by how one experience causes another, or our later memories of them.

Teletransporter paradox

Star Track Transporter – we are broken apart and then put back together atom by atom. This is much like how we change over time, and things may get pushed back or deleted from our self

1. William James –

knower (central self) and known (peripheral self).

Gallagher (2000) –

minimal (central self) (self as a sense of agency and ownership) and narrative self (peripheral self)– the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Damasio (1999) – core self (central self) and extended self (peripheral self)

– what persists over time: it has a past of autobiographical memory, and it can think about itself in. context and future.

Antonio Damasio proposed Three Level of Self, corresponding to different types of consciousness.

The proto-self, Extended consciousness, Core consciousness

Core consciousness

emerges when the organism has emotions in responses to changes to its internal state. For example, an organism feels fear and responds based on those emotions (fleeing).

-          The Core Self is the self that is aware of the body and through perception the outside world. For Damasio, Consciousness is the feeling of knowing a feeling.

The Core Self is closest to the everyday conception of self. Damasio hypothesizes that the main coordinator of the core self is the

thalamus, but other areas are involved, including the brainstem, and the cortex.

The proto-self

is not aware and it exists in primitive organisms (such organisms have sensations (such as pain) but not emotions (fear of having pain). The _____ ____ is a nonconscious state shared by many animals. It involves some moment- by moment representation of the organism’s internal state. Hunger, experiencing an aversive stimulus, knowing its location in space. It a prerequisite of any experiencing self that has information about the state of its body.

The proto-self depends on the evolutionary older regions of the brain such as

the brainstem, hypothalamus, and insula (insular cortex) that are involved in homeostatic mechanisms (hunger, thirst, movement, feelings from the body, and emotion).

The proto-self resembles Freud’s

ID it represents the body and our emotions.

Reflection, or self-awareness, only comes with

extended consciousness, which gives us self-awareness, only comes with extended consciousness

Extended consciousness

depends on having autobiographical memory, where the sense of awareness extends over time, leading to a sense of identity.

The extended or autobiographical self

is based on memory and on anticipations of the future and develops gradually throughout life.

One must have a core self to have

an autobiographical self, but the reverse is not true.

-          It is not a double dissociation because we cannot have an extended self without

a core self, but there are times that the core self might be temporarily absent

(such as sleep or an epileptic absence).

-          Damasio attaches great importance to the role of emotion, which he refers to as

internal changes in the body state (chemical, visceral, and muscular) and also

the accompanying changes in the NS.

-          Emotions are not conscious but when they are induced they may give rise to

“feelings”.

mnemonic self.

We have a continuity of existence that depends on our memory and is sometimes called our

Executive self or executive function –

decision making, planning, reasoning, and thinking about ourselves and our cognitive abilities (metacognition) are all examples what we call executive processes.

Episodic Memory –

memory for specific events located in time or some type of sequence that can be explicitly observed ( observing behaviors in other animals) – therefore shows that memory has entered some type of consciousness

Commissurotomy

earlier procedure (split brain) that involved cutting through other brain structures, such as the thalamus as well.split-brain

Split-brain –

cutting of the corpus collosum, used to be done on people with epilepsy

The body is wired contralaterally,

so that information from the left side of the body goes initially to the right hemisphere, and vice versa

Dissociative fugue

(in incarnations of the APA Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders prior to 5, it is called fugue state) is a condition where a person has a loss of memory for autobiographical information, usually as a result of a severely stressful event, for a short period of time, usually a few hours or days (although longer periods have also been reported). During the fugue, the person might travel and assume a new identity. Some loss of memory can be induced by psychoactive drugs, body trauma, or delirium, but these are not counted as psychiatric in origin. On recovery, the person may be surprised to find themselves in unfamiliar surroundings. After recovery from the fugue, there might be a more permanent loss of memory for the precipitating stressful event (called dissociative amnesia)

The frontal lobes and prefrontal cortex are responsible for

executive processes